By timothy from Slashdot's hope-no-one-fell-asleep-inside deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt: "The United States Air Force's novel robotic X-37B space plane is tucked inside the bulbous nose cone of an unmanned rocket that blasted off Thursday from Florida on a mission shrouded in secrecy. ... The unmanned military Orbital Test Vehicle 1 (OTV-1) — also known as the X-37B — lifted off at 7:52 p.m. EDT atop an Atlas 5 rocket on a mission that is expected to take months testing new spacecraft technologies. ... Key objectives of the space plane's first flight include demonstration and validation of guidance, navigation and control systems &ndash; including a 'do-it-itself' autonomous re-entry and landing at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base with neighboring Edwards Air Force Base as a backup."

By timothy from Slashdot's but-it's-got-raisins-you-like-raisins deptartment:
alvin67 writes "Microsoft Evangelist, Pete Brown rants about the lack of pixels available in today's LCD screens: 'Ok, that's it. I've had it. I want my pixels, damn-it! For a while, screen resolution has been going up on our desktop displays. The trend was good, as I've always wanted the largest monitor with the highest DPI that I could afford. I mean, I used to have one of the first hulking 17" CRTs on my desk. I later upgraded to a 21-inch job that was so huge, that if you didn't stick it in a corner, it took up the whole desk. It was flat-panel, though and full of pixels. It cost me around $1100 at the time."
After some years of improvements, we've regressed, in Brown's opinion: "At the rate we were going for a while, we should have had twice or three times the DPI on a 24 or 23 inch screen. But nooo."

By timothy from Slashdot's all-those-in-favor-and-then-some deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes "In Truro, Massachusetts (a town on Cape Cod), a zoning decision came up for vote, where the results were 136 for, 70 against. The vote required 2/3 approval to pass. The Town Clerk and Town Accountant believe that since .66 * 206 is less than 136, the vote passes. However, an 'anonymous caller' noted that a more accurate value of 2/3 would require 137 (or perhaps even 138 votes) for the measure to be considered passed. The MA Secretary of State and State Attorney General are hard at work to resolve this issue."

By timothy from Slashdot's only-obscure-if-you-think-it-is deptartment:
Annirak writes "With the bottom dropping out of the magnetic disk market and SSD prices still over $3/GB, I want to know if there is a way to to get the best of both worlds. Ideally, a caching algorithm would store frequently used sectors, or sectors used during boot or application launches (hot sectors), to the SSD. Adaptec has a firmware implementation of this concept, called MaxIQ, but this is only for use on their RAID controllers and only works with their special, even more expensive, SSD. Silverstone recently released a device which does this for a single disk, but it is limited: it caches the first part of the magnetic disk, up to the size of the SSD, rather than caching frequently used sectors. The FS-Cache implementation in recent Linux kernels seems to be primarily intended for use in NFS and AFS, without much provision for speeding up local filesystems. Is there a way to use an SSD to act as a hot sector cache for a magnetic disk under Linux?"

By timothy from Slashdot's spd-getting-hit-from-all-sides deptartment:
An anonymous reader writes "In 2008, the Seattle Police illegally arrested security consultant Eric Rachner for refusing to show ID. After Rachner filed a formal complaint, he was prosecuted for obstructing, and the police claimed that videos of the arrest were unavailable — until Rachner's research uncovered proof that the police had the videos all along." It's an interesting story of how he figured out how the system in use by Seattle police automatically tracks deletion, copying, or other uses of the recorded stream.

By timothy from Slashdot's your-gigantic-whiteboard deptartment:
toruonu writes "How do you keep track of what's in your datacenter, where it is, what it's connected to and what is it doing right now? I mean I have built a datacenter from scratch over the years and I have machines from Sun, IBM, HP, Supermicro. I have machines that are simple workernodes and machines that are heavy grade storage consolidation machines. Then there are tens of switches, some for interconnect, some for management and don't get me started on the UPSs etc. So how does one keep any kind of decent track of such a system as the current form of twiki pages with various tables just doesn't cut it anymore and I'm looking for a freeware solution that could actually show me a visual representation of the various nodes in the racks, their connections and dependencies. Just to give a simple example, if I'm going to disconnect UPS #3 right now and swap switch #5, which machines should I even consider taking offline?" (The best-looking such system I've seen was being used at OSCON at a display booth for the Open Source Lab, and I think it was home-grown. Anyone who can shed light on that system?)

By timothy from Slashdot's while-the-rivers-run-clear deptartment:
bbsguru writes "A court settlement has ended a controversial case of medical privacy abuse. From the NYTimes: 'Seven years ago, the Havasupai Indians, who live in the deepest part of the Grand Canyon, issued a 'banishment order' to keep Arizona State University employees from setting foot on their reservation, an ancient punishment for what they regarded as a genetic-era betrayal. Members of the tiny tribe had given DNA samples to university researchers starting in 1990, hoping they might provide genetic clues to the tribe's high rate of diabetes. But members learned their blood samples also had been used to study many other things, including mental illness and theories of the tribe's geographical origins that contradict their traditional stories.'"

By timothy from Slashdot's that-would-bug-me deptartment:
thsoundman writes with this excerpt from The Gamers Blog: "No more manuals? Ubisoft announced last week that they will be ditching the trend of printing instruction manuals for new games under the 'green' initiative. While no other publishers have jumped on that 'green' train just yet it is likely that others will follow suit. Printed manuals have been part of gaming since you bought PC games in plastic bags. There have been many stand out eras for manuals such as the NES-era booklets to the manuals that accompanied Electronic Arts vinyl-sized game sleeves. Some may argue that the advancement in on screen contextual commands, first level tutorials have made the manual pointless but is this really the case?"

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's rumor-mill-working-overtime deptartment:
gyrogeerloose writes "An article in the London Evening Standard claims that Apple has made an $8 billion offer to acquire ARM Holdings. For those few Slashdotters who don't already know, ARM makes the processor chips that power Apple's iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. However, ARM processors are also used by other manufacturers, including Palm and, perhaps most significantly, companies building Android phones. This explains why Apple might be willing to spend so much on the deal — almost 20% of its cash reserves. Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over its competitors."

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's enough-with-the-farmville deptartment:
itwbennett writes "Peter Smith is blogging about day 1 of the Facebook F8 conference and Mark Zuckerberg's vision for Facebook, which, as it turns out, is somewhat confusing:'Zuckerberg clearly sees Facebook as a service. Facebook Connect, (the name), is going away and being replaced by the Facebook Platform. "Share on Facebook" buttons are being replaced with "Like on Facebook" buttons. And Comcast is now called Xfinity... what does it all mean to the end user? There's a new API to fetch data from Facebook more easily, which sounds great, if only I could figure out why I'd want to do that. The overall tone of the keynote was that Facebook was serious business and they were going to build the Social Graph, a vast network of connections between people and the things they like. Zuckerberg was a man with a mission."

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's contaminating-the-planet deptartment:
phaic tan writes "Bridie Smith from the Sydney Morning Herald reports on the Hyabusa spacecraft returning to earth in June with samples from the Itokawa Asteroid: 'A Japanese spacecraft will land in Australia in June, bringing with it samples from an asteroid found 300 million kilometres from Earth. The unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft, launched in May 2003, will become the first spacecraft to bring asteroid material to Earth when it lands in Woomera, South Australia, later this year.'"

By CmdrTaco from Slashdot's rumor-mill-working-ot deptartment:
gyrogeerloose writes "An article in the London Evening Standard claims that Apple has made an $8 billion offer to acquire ARM Holdings. For those few Slashdotters who don't already know, ARM makes the processor chips that power Apple's iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch. However, ARM processors are also used by other manufacturers, including Palm and, perhaps most significantly, companies building Android phones. This explains why Apple might be willing to spend so much on the deal--almost 20% of it's cash reserves. Being able to control who gets to use the processors (and, more importantly, who doesn't) would give Apple a huge advantage over it's competitors."